The drawing begins as a pen-and-ink sketch, then George paints over the sketch with watercolor. Artwork © George Pratt
GP: Correct. DRAW!: So you have an Illustration department and a Fine Art department? GP: Yeah. The Fine Art department has very few students these days. Our department is the largest one on campus. We have upwards of 500 students just in our own department. Next is Computer Animation, and then Gaming. There’s a new one coming up they’re just starting, and that’s the Virtual Reality department. But we are the largest. DRAW!: And this is Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida? GP: Yes. Down south of Tampa. It’s nice here. DRAW!: How many years have you been there? GP: Man, it’s twelve years I’ve been here, I think. DRAW!: And you were teaching in New York before that, right? GP: Yeah, I taught at Pratt Institute and then the Joe Kubert School, and I did per diem teaching for Marshall Arisman and his Master’s program [at the School of Visual Arts]. I was also one of the advisors for that program, off and on, for students. Then in ’98 I moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and didn’t do any teaching until I taught a ten-week stint at SCAD in Savannah. My first day was 9/11. DRAW!: Oh, geez! GP: Yeah, it was horrible. My son was only one year old then, and he and my then-wife were in Chapel Hill. It was freaky. Later I taught for three, maybe close to four years at Virginia Commonwealth University, and that was a bit of a long commute. That was when Greg Spalenka called, and he was like,
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“Oh, man, I’m going to be in your neck of the woods.” He was doing the Illustration Academy in Richmond. And that’s actually how I started teaching at Virginia Commonwealth. They saw me do my dog-and-pony and hit me up. I just wanted to see the Academy, because I’d heard so much about it. Greg talked to John English [co-founder of the Illustration Academy], and John said, “Have him come up. I’m not going to pay him or anything [laughter], but have him come up if he wants to scope it out, and I’ll get him a hotel room.” So I came up, and John and I hit it off immediately. We had a blast, and he had me take over the drawing session one night. I was working on the Wolverine: Netsuke series at that point, so I had one of the covers I’d just finished, and I brought that. But John wanted me to keep coming back each year. After Richmond we moved it down here to Ringling’s campus. Ringling saw me do my dog-and-pony, and they headhunted me from Virginia Commonwealth. I was on tenure track at that point, but I was actually happy to leave. The tenure thing was so onerous, having to sit and validate my existence every time I turned around. I was like, “I should be teaching instead of sitting around doing this stuff.” Ringling doesn’t have tenure; it’s just a yearly contract. But if you’ve been here long enough, it’s pretty much like tenure. I’ve been here ever since. And I still do the Academy in the summers, but that’s now back up in Kansas City. DRAW!: So the Illustration Academy was originally in Richmond, Virginia? GP: Well, it was originally in Liberty, Kansas. And then it might have moved into Kansas City, but then it went down to Richmond, and that’s when I got involved. It was an offshoot. The original inception of the Illustration Academy was the Illustrators Workshop, which was Mark English, Bernie Fuchs, Bob Peak, Alan Cober, Fred Otnes, and Robert Hein-